SA Tech Founders Raise R19.5 Million for AI Startup Backed by Uber and Airtable Investors
- South African AI startup Verascient secured a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round backed by investors who backed Uber and Airtable
- Co-founders Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira built Verascient to help enterprises move beyond basic AI experimentation into real workflows
- With funding secured, the startup launched a recruitment drive to find the top 1% of AI engineering talent in South Africa
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Two South African tech founders have secured R19.5 million in pre-seed funding for their AI startup, drawing investment from some of the biggest names in global venture capital.
Verascient, co-founded by Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira, closed an oversubscribed $1.2 million funding round that attracted Founder Collective, the firm that backed early-stage companies including Uber and Airtable, alongside Andrena Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise, and Summit Ventures. Angel investors Alan Knott-Craig and Shayne Mann also participated in the round.
What Verascient actually does
The startup positions itself as an AI operating system for large businesses, targeting sectors such as financial services, insurance, and logistics. Its core focus is solving a problem many companies face: implementing AI in ways that generate real commercial value rather than remaining stuck at the pilot phase.
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The platform uses a Temporal Knowledge Graph that pulls together scattered company data from emails, spreadsheets, and internal systems while preserving the full history and permissions attached to that data. It also connects to over 1,000 existing business applications through an agent-to-agent messaging protocol. What sets Verascient apart from typical software providers is that it pairs this infrastructure with in-house AI engineers who work directly alongside client teams.
The founders behind the raise
According to a report, Ferreira, the company's CTO, taught himself to code at 12 years old. He worked as an early developer at Replit, earned a distinction in his MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and recently co-authored research on enterprise AI costs with the UN International Computing Centre.
Stokoe, the CEO, was part of the founding team at Fibertime, a township fibre provider, before going on to launch Purple Dorm, an AI consultancy with operations in both the UK and South Africa.
With capital now in hand, the pair are looking to recruit what they describe as the top 1% of AI engineering talent from within South Africa, making a deliberate bet that homegrown technical skills can compete on a global stage.
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Source: Briefly News
